[Cryptography] Safeplug - TOR for the masses

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Sat Dec 7 15:37:55 EST 2013


The makers of Pogoplug, little devices that let you access storage from your home via the Internet, have come up with a device that provides "TOR for the masses":  A little box that attaches to your router and sends your web traffic through TOR (probably by implementing a proxy - the details are a bit unclear from what I've read so far):

http://blog.pogoplug.com/internet-anonymity-how-safe-are-you-3353/

Available today for $49 + $9 shipping.

A Safeplug can be configured to be a full Tor relay node, though that setting is off by default.

Interesting points:

- This is the first attempt I know of to design and sell a way for non-techies to use TOR easily.  Pogoplug's been around for a couple of years, with limited success (though the company has obviously survived), and the makers do seem to know how to build devices that ordinary consumers can use.  It'll be interesting to see whether there actually *is* a mass market for anonymized Web access.
- If they manage to sell a reasonable number of these, and a reasonable fraction of buyers turn on relay support, the size (hence performance) of TOR could increase significantly.
- Conversely, if they succeed, they are going to have a huge bulls-eye painted on their chests.  NSA - and others - will really, really want to find a way to get hooks into these boxes, potentially letting them "own" a large number of relay nodes.
                                                        -- Jerry



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